Howto: Move /home and secure your files and configuration

[Sam]

I could transfer all my files and mails to /home, rename the partition in Windows - and it would be perfect. It works fine - I tried it, but I find it still to dangerous.

Yes it is a qustion of permission.

The owner of the shared partition is root - to make a link it is necessary that the owner is the user. After I changed the permission, it worked fine.

I know to change the permission for one file, but not for all the files eg. the whole partition.

$ cd <dir>
$ find . -type f -exec sudo chown <username>:<group> {} \;

Replace <dir> by the base directory.
Replace <username> and <group> with your username (the group you belong has the same name as the username).

[foxy123]

It is a very good idea to have /home on a separate partition. I have it on m desktop PC and am going to do it on my laptop. i've got a 40Gb HD and want to split in in 2: a system partition and a home partition. I wonder how much space should I left for system? Would 4.5 gig be enough?

[Sam]

It is a very good idea to have /home on a separate partition. I have it on m desktop PC and am going to do it on my laptop. i've got a 40Gb HD and want to split in in 2: a system partition and a home partition. I wonder how much space should I left for system? Would 4.5 gig be enough?

Yes, I have personally 3.5 Go on my root partition, with a lot of applications installed and a 32bit chroot environnement.

[AgenT]

I recommend not storing your personal files directly in your /home/username, but to create a subfolder: Documents.
Then do a backup as Heliode describes of your /home directory, but exclude the /home/username/documents Save this backup under your new /home.

Note: Remember to also exclude this backup and the system backup which is now located under /home.

Can someone explain to me what the point of doing this is? Why everything in Documents? Are you saying that /home/xyz/ should be empty except for the dotted "invisible" files (configs)? Why? What are the advantages of this?

Curious. Right now I have a much better backup plan than what is explained in the backup how-to using rsnapshot (search for it, it's well worth it!). It's much better because of a lot of reasons, but one is: acts like rsync and uses hard links (meaning one can have 16 backups of home that has an average of 5GB and have all that be around 5GB!).

[Lunde]

I guess I just prefere collecting the documents in a sepereate folder.

I find it a great benefit running emulators like VMware, then share the documents dir and use the same dir as My documents in Windows.

Also be able to share the documents between users without giving write access to configuration files.

And be able to do an extreemly quick and easy backup and restore of the user configuration

I can't find anything negative about seperating configuration and documents, if there is please let me know.

I'm definitly going to look into rsnapshot. Thanks

[AgenT]

I find it a great benefit running emulators like VMware, then share the documents dir and use the same dir as My documents in Windows.

But could'nt you do the same with your home dir? If you are willing to share all your personal info, your personal configs won't really be more of a security risk. Especially since this is an emulator so you are going to be accessing these files from the same computer.

Also be able to share the documents between users without giving write access to configuration files.

Agreed. But why would you share *all* your documents with other users? If I were to share I would make a "share" folder and share that. This way I control what files are shared and what files are not.

And be able to do an extreemly quick and easy backup and restore of the user configuration

This I do not understand. How is changing the folder make a difference in how easy it is to backup and restore? Because you only want to backup your regular files? First, all you have to do is exclude all dotted files which is easy to do. Second, if you are backing up your home files, why would you not backup your configs as well? Maybe it has to do with how limited you are with your current backup solution (see rsnapshot).

I can't find anything negative about seperating configuration and documents, if there is please let me know.

First, it's more annoying to backup and restore (twice the work - granted, it's still not much more). Also, it's more cumbersome. And it makes browsing your home dir more annoying because now you have to go up/down one extra folder (instead of it being /home/something it is /home/something/somethingelse). More work. There are a lot of other specific reasons but my guess is they don't apply to you. To me it's like a waste of a folder. Sort of like having your config files in /etc/documents/ instead of /etc/.

Personally, I use multiple folders inside my home folder. Have a nice layout with different folders for different type of files. I backup the whole /home/ folder, plus others (/usr/local/bin/, /etc/, etc.). And up to this point I only needed to use my backup twice. Once because I deleted a file accidently (ha!) and the other time because I migrated from one distro to another. Both ran rsnapshot. And I backup "daily" and "monthly".

I'm definitly going to look into rsnapshot.

Good idea! http://www.rsnapshot.org/ - the author is also a very nice person.

[Lunde]

I guess it's just preference to what you find most beneficial.

Sharing and user authentication is easy done on several levels anyway, no difference there accept the possibuility to share all without the configuration files.

I have 60gig of files, don't want to backup all of that, can exlude what ever you want anyway form the backup, but I guess I just find it more easy collecting the files in one place. If I want to restore my configuration, I just do so in 5min. And to be honest, I only backup about 5% of my documents, I'm not so scared of loosing the rest.

I've made a menu based shell script / program that does the backup and restore for me. As soon as I'm done testing it, I'll post it here

I agree a bit on the extra folder regarding downloaded programs / tar files etc. This is mostly the only thing I navigate to by terminal. I like using symlinks placed on the desktop and/or directly under ~/

But I guess you're right, I might be a bit direct when I use the word recommend, I should maybe change it to I prefere.

[AgenT]

Nah, it's just your preference. No need to change anything.

You seem to have your files and backup setup one way while I have it setup a totally different way. Mine works for me. Just so you know, rsnapshot allows you to exclude and include files and folders based on a lot of specifications (whole file names or regular expressions, etc.).

[Lunde]

Good idea! http://www.rsnapshot.org/ - the author is also a very nice person.

Rsnapshot is added in the howto as an alternative backup solution.

And... Recommend is changed to prefere

[kultex]

I found something:

I changed my fstab entry to:

/dev/hdxx /home/"username"/windows_e vfat user,rw,exec,uid="username",gid="username" 0 0

now, the whole partition belongs to the user, but still it is not possible to make a link - when I try this in Nautilus, I get all the time: Error "Operation not permitted" while creating a link to "/home/tom/windows_e/Bilder"

But with the filemanager gentoo or emelfm it is possible - so this is just a problem of Ubuntu, Gnome or Nautilus.